Pages

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

This is the year of reminders

In 2007 I packed up the office since I was going to be away for a year. When I came back, it took a year before I managed to unpack. There was something about the feeling of being slightly away that I enjoyed, an illusion of not being quite there. But at the same time I felt the absence of my books keenly, and one by one the boxes found their way into the office, there to be opened and rummaged through, in the search of one book or another.

Now I have managed to unpack almost all, and get them back into shelves. But then I have to make decisions like the following:

I am the proud owner of a copy of self-published material from the Institute of Nordic language and culture in Bergen, from 1983. It's not even removely relevant, and I think it used to belong to my husband. Do I throw it away? Before you say YES, I should mention that it contains two early works by professor Toril Moi, from before she finished her Dr. art. in Comparative literature.

It's 26 years old, and I bet Toril Moi would like to forget all about those two articles - one on Narcissism in Hedda Gabler, the other on Freud's Dora. I, however, find that I cherish them just because of that. In the shelves I just unpacked there should be (unless my daughter has borrowed it) a book by Toril Moi on one of the women she admires, Simone de Beauvoir. At the same time Toril Moi has almost become a similar icon to female Norwegian scholars: One of those big names that you mention to let people know that yes, there are great, successful Norwegian scholars out there.

No comments:

About Me

This is the journal of Torill Elvira Mortensen. I am an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. The topics of my writings here are among other things media studies, reader-response theory, role-play games, Internet Culture, travel, academic weirdness and online communication - put together at random.
Google scholar page.

Personal Publication and Public Attention, Torill Elvira Mortensen (2004): "Personal Publication and Public attention", in Gurak, Laura, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff and Jessica Reyman (ed): Into the Blogosphere; Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/, University of Minnesota.

Pleasures of the Player (pdf), Torill Elvira Mortensen (2003): Pleasures of the Player; Flow and control in online games, Doctoral Dissertation Volda College and University of Bergen.

Other useful sites

The Gamers' Space

The Gamers' Space is a small project I am doing in the spring 2009. It includes an electronic survey, pictures of game machines of different kinds, and interviews done at The Gathering, a large LAN party in Hamar, Norway. For participation, more information, links and addresses, check The Gamers' Space.